Most of what an office manager does in a week is checking. Did the tech's notes match the invoice? Has anyone reminded the Hendersons about the $640 from three weeks ago? Are the spring tune-ups booked? Did the supply house quietly raise the price on capacitors again? None of it is hard. All of it slips when the phones are busy.
AI office help does the checking and drafts the fix. It never just does it: every proposal waits in one queue, shows why it was made, and a person taps approve. You decide later which of the low-risk ones can apply themselves.
What each helper does
| Helper | What it looks at | What it proposes | Risk level | Undo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Invoice review | Tech notes and visit summaries, the invoice, your active price book | Missing price book lines, each with a quote from the notes | Low | Removes exactly those lines, unless paid or void |
| Collections | Sent invoices more than 3 days past due with a balance | A text reminder under 300 characters, one per invoice per week | Reaches the customer | No |
| Membership visits | Due member visits, tech capacity and skills | A day and two-hour window with a tech, or an unscheduled job | Low | Cancels the job and returns the visit to the due list |
| Bills | Supplier bills forwarded by email or typed in | Bill approval after a match against the PO and receipts; cost updates when prices rise | Bill approval: normal. Cost update: low | Cost update: discards the draft |
Invoice review
This is the one that pays for itself fastest. A tech writes "replaced contactor, cleaned condenser, added 2 lb R-410A" in the notes and the invoice only has the diagnostic. When the visit is marked done, invoice review reads the notes against the invoice and your price book and proposes the missing lines.
Each suggested line has to pass three checks in code before it reaches you. The item must be active in your price book. It must not already be on the invoice. And the quote it gives as evidence must actually appear in the notes. A suggestion that fails any of those is dropped. If the invoice is clean, you see nothing. Paid and void invoices are skipped, and a sweep picks up jobs completed in the last three days that were missed.
Collections reminders
For sent invoices more than three days past due, the helper drafts one text per invoice per week. The draft is written from the invoice and the customer's first name, not their whole account. It's under 300 characters with no link in it; the pay link is added by TradesWork when the reminder is sent.
You can edit the wording in the queue before approving ("Approve & send"). If the invoice gets paid or voided between the draft and your approval, sending is refused. This helper never auto-applies: the setting is disabled with the note that texts always need approval. For the full dunning process, see collections.
Membership visit booking
This helper doesn't use AI at all. It works through due membership visits, up to 20 a run, and for each looks for the earliest weekday in the next two weeks where a tech who counts for capacity and has the right job-type skills has room, choosing the least-loaded tech first. It proposes a two-hour arrival window. If nobody has room, it proposes an unscheduled job so dispatch can place it.
Undo cancels the job and its appointment and puts the visit back on the due list. Once a tech has started, undo is refused.
Supplier bills and cost creep
Forward a supplier bill to your company's bills address, or type it in. The AI reads vendor, PO number, dates, lines, tax and total; contact details are removed before the bill is read. Then each line is matched three ways, against the PO and against what was received:
- Matched, cost over, quantity over, not received, not on PO or no PO.
- Line costs within 1% match. The total tolerance defaults to $5.00 and is adjustable.
If a supplier's cost is more than 3% above the cost in your price book (also adjustable), the helper proposes a price book cost update. Approving it stages a draft; nothing changes until you publish. That's the moment to check whether the flat rate on that task still holds its margin. The markup and margin calculator helps.
Without AI, a forwarded bill is stored as "Needs entry" for someone to type in, and matching still runs once it's entered.
The Approvals queue
Approvals has two tabs: Waiting for you and Recent decisions. Items are grouped by helper, and the nav shows a count.
- 1
Read the item
Title, the reason it was proposed, a Low risk or Reaches the customer badge, when it was proposed and a link to the job.
- 2
Check the exact change
The lines to add with the quote from the notes, the text of the reminder, the visit window and tech, the bill and its match flags, or the old and new cost.
- 3
Decide
Approve, Reject, or edit the reminder text and Approve & send. Approve selected handles up to 100 low-risk items at once.
- 4
See it applied
The change goes through the normal rules with your permissions. If a rule refuses it, the item says Couldn't apply and why, with a Try again button.
Two people can't apply the same item twice, and a text is sent once even if someone double-taps.
Modes, permissions and undo
Each helper has a mode:
- Off: it doesn't run.
- Suggest (you approve): the default for every helper. Everything waits.
- Auto-apply low-risk: only adding invoice lines, booking a membership visit and staging a cost update apply on their own. Bill approvals, texts and automation runs still wait.
Auto-applied items act with the current permissions of the person who last saved the AI settings. If that person leaves the team or loses approval rights, auto-apply stops rather than running under nobody's name.
What can be undone
Approval rights belong to owners, admins, dispatchers and accounting. Changing modes or turning AI off is for owners and admins.
Automations, in the same place
Automations aren't AI. They're rules: 14 event triggers (job booked, estimate sold, invoice sent, payment received, review received, voicemail left and more) and 4 scheduled ones (estimate still open, invoice overdue, membership ending soon, customer not seen in a while). Set one to Ask first and each run waits in Approvals before it texts, emails, tags or creates a task. A test run on a real event from the last 30 days shows what would happen without sending anything.
How this compares
ServiceTitan's AI assistant, Atlas, is described in its help center as a Core product, but most of its office features, including Atlas in Accounting for reviewing invoices, are listed as Private Preview with a waitlist1. The same article says Atlas may produce inaccurate, incomplete or outdated responses and should be verified before acting1. Its AI Concierge screen manages voice and text Virtual Agents in one place2.
We think the right answer to "AI can be wrong" is structural rather than a disclaimer: show the evidence on every proposal, check it in code, and keep a person between the AI and anything that reaches a customer or moves money.
Turning it on without regret
A sensible first month
- Leave every helper on Suggest for two weeks
- Approve or reject daily so the queue stays short
- Look at the approval rate per helper at the end of week two
- Move invoice review to Auto-apply only if you've been approving almost everything
- Keep collections on Suggest; it can't auto-send anyway
- Check Settings, AI for 30-day usage and estimated cost
The honest edge: AI office help reads what your team writes and what suppliers send. Sloppy notes or a missing price book item mean fewer, not wrong, suggestions. And if your office is one person who already knows every job by heart, the gain is smaller. It's the shop with five techs and too many jobs to remember where the queue pays off.
Footnotes
-
ServiceTitan help center, Atlas. https://help.servicetitan.com/docs/atlas ↩ ↩2
-
ServiceTitan Release Hub, Find and manage your AI agents in one place with AI Concierge. https://help.servicetitan.com/release-hub/docs/find-and-manage-your-ai-agents-in-one-place-with-ai-concierge ↩
